AT&T on Thursday officially turned on its high-speed LTE network in the Bay Area and New York City, a geek hotbed that had traditionally criticized AT&T for its poor network coverage.
Officially, the new markets are: the New York City metro area, Austin, Chapel Hill, Los Angeles, Oakland, Orlando, Phoenix, Raleigh, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose.
In 2011, AT&T added 15 LTE markets: Athens, Ga.; Atlanta; Baltimore; Boston; Charlotte; Chicago; Dallas-Fort Worth; Houston; Indianapolis; Kansas City; Las Vegas; Oklahoma City; San Antonio; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Washington, D.C.
AT&T promised to cover 70 million people with LTE by the end of the year. However, John Stankey, AT&T's head of business solutions, said at a conference on Thursday that it covered 74 million, ahead of expectations, Reuters reported.
"We're building a 4G LTE network that's blazing fast, and we offer dual layers of 4G technologies to provide customers with a more consistent speed experience," Stankey said in a statement. "Our network, together with our unsurpassed 4G device portfolio and innovative applications, will give our customers an industry-leading mobile broadband experience."
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What advantages does LTE have? According to PCMag.com's official Q&A with AT&T on LTE, "4G LTE offers real-world speeds faster than other mobile broadband technologies," the company said. "While our HSPA+ network is faster than 3G, 4G LTE enables users to stream video, download apps, and send and receive e-mail even faster. In addition, 4G LTE has lower latency than other mobile broadband technologies, which means more responsive performance for customers when they want it most."
AT&T also said that it would deploy voice over 4G LTE as the company's 4G LTE footprint is built out further.
AT&T's deployment is good news for the Bay Area, the home of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco startup and apps community. Traditionally, San Francisco's civic bureaucracy has placed hurdles to the addition of new cell phone towers, which can be blocked by citizens or neighborhoods. That's left Silicon Valley techies frustrated at the lack of adequate AT&T coverage for their iPhones and other devices.
However, the current iPhone 4S will not be able to tap into the AT&T LTE network. Instead, AT&T's first LTE phones include the HTC Vivid and the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket.
The other remaining question is how much spectrum AT&T will allocate to each of those markets, which will affect the amount of bandwidth it can provide to customers, and how much congestion customers will experience. (Last year, PCMag.com tested AT&T's LTE network in Boston.) For example, AT&T reportedly has 24 MHz of 700-MHz spectrum in the Texas cities where it launched the technology, but only 12 MHz in Chicago. That means it can run its LTE network on paired 10-MHz (10x10) channels in Texas, but it has to use 5MHz channels in Chicago. Verizon, on the other hand, has at least 22MHz everywhere in the nation, so it can use at least 10MHz channels everywhere.
Update: AT&T is currently using 10x10 spectrum in all 4G LTE markets except Athens, Ga., Chapel Hill, N.C., Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oklahoma City, Raleigh, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, where they're using 5x5, according to an AT&T spokesman.